Why ScholarTHON?

ScholarTHON emerged from a growing sense that something was missing from contemporary conversations about AI, digital methods, and the future of research.

Across universities, museums, libraries, and archives, Arts and Humanities researchers are increasingly encouraged – and sometimes pressured – to engage with new technologies. Training events, workshops, AI demonstrations, and hackathons have multiplied rapidly in recent years. Much of this activity is accompanied by a familiar narrative: everything is changing, we must adapt, and we must move faster.

What often seems absent from these conversations is a clear sense of purpose:

• What exactly are we adapting for?
• What kinds of research do we want to enable?
• What forms of expertise do we want to preserve?
• And perhaps most importantly: what is the role of the Arts and Humanities scholar in this rapidly changing landscape?

ScholarTHON began as an attempt to create space for those questions. It also emerged from a shared concern across its partner organisations. Data/Culture works to connect researchers to datasets, tools, and digital methods; Digital Scholarship @ Oxford's Open-Source Project aims at building communities around software and its reuse; and the Mapping the Arts and Humanities Project (MAHP) makes visible the centres, networks, learned societies, and researchers who often remain hidden within the wider research landscape. The ScholarTHON became a space where these different forms of connection could meet.

Borrowing from the hackathon format developed in programming and software development cultures, the ScholarTHON retained what many people value most about hackathons – focused time, collaboration, experimentation, and the encounter with new tools – while removing the pressure to produce a finished product. Instead, the emphasis shifted towards something often overlooked: the development of research questions.

This shift was also a response to another increasingly scarce resource: time. A UCU report (2022) found that escalating workloads were leaving many academics unable to carry out the teaching and research they had entered the profession to do. More recently, a HEPI–British Academy report (2024) suggested that these pressures fall particularly heavily on researchers at earlier career stages.

Researchers are often expected to produce more outputs, adapt to new technologies, and navigate increasingly complex institutional environments, all while finding less and less time to think. ScholarTHON was designed as a protected thinking space. Stepping away from the pressure of immediate production, it provided two days dedicated to exploration, reflection, and intellectual exchange.

At the same time, the event sought to rethink the relationship between scholars and Research Software Engineers (RSEs).

In many projects, technical expertise enters once the intellectual direction has already been established. At the ScholarTHON, each group worked alongside an embedded RSE from the very beginning. The goal was to create a dialogue. We asked: what happens when technical and disciplinary expertise shape a question together? What kinds of questions become possible when different forms of knowledge genuinely meet?

Underlying all of this was a broader concern about expertise itself.

As generative AI systems become increasingly capable of producing code, text, and images, both scholars and RSEs find themselves navigating uncertain terrain. The role of the RSE remains crucial yet often precarious (Beavan et al. 2025), while that of the Arts and Humanities scholar is increasingly placed under pressure from multiple directions. As generative AI systems are treated as authoritative and ostensibly neutral sources of knowledge, scholarly judgement, interpretation, and critique risk being flattened into information retrieval. Meanwhile, researchers are encouraged to produce, perform, and promote, often leaving less room for the slower intellectual work of questioning assumptions, challenging narratives, and generating genuinely new ways of thinking.

The event therefore proposed a few simple counterpoints:

• Slowness rather than acceleration
• Collaboration rather than service provision
• Research questions rather than solutions

Instead of rushing toward solutions, the aim was to leave with better questions.

As one participant later reflected: “You can finally challenge and confront all the questions that you never have time to think about during work.” Another underscored the collaborative nature of the event: “It connected me. With disciplines, people, questions and ideas.”

And perhaps that is the simplest definition of a ScholarTHON. It is a space where scholars and Research Software Engineers can think together about what research might become before deciding what they want technology to do.